


Hope, Salvation, and Home

by notamisfitjustafreak



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Angst??, Character Study??, Internalization, M/M, Mild Language, andrew's pov, i love trying to get inside andrew's head help
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-22
Updated: 2017-01-22
Packaged: 2018-09-19 05:48:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9421265
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notamisfitjustafreak/pseuds/notamisfitjustafreak
Summary: Andrew Joseph Minyard, by all means, is not an emotional person.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> Thank you so much for the beta, Thel!!  
> You're the best!!

       Andrew Joseph Minyard, by all means, is not an emotional person. Having a childhood like his own could have elicited a more aggressive and emotionally unstable individual, but Andrew is only violent at worst and apathetic at best. Even with his drugs, the smiles and laughter he showed to everyone had all been fake and out of place.

 

       But when Neil Josten had entered their lives, the consistency of Andrew Joseph Minyard changed, and this everyone could tell.

 

       After his first encounter with Neil, he labeled him as a  _ **Problem**_  — both to the team and to his people. If the upperclassmen were going to complain about the rookie, then surely his group would end up getting caught along with their stupid drama, and if there’s drama it’s expected that Nicky and Aaron would open their mouths to make everything worse. As everything goes down, Kevin would probably tuck himself away inside his crumbling mentality that would inevitably hinder him from keeping the end of his bargain with Andrew and one of the things that Andrew hate is broken promises.

 

       Replaying one too many times over the video of Josten that his Millport coach sent to them had been, in a word, illuminating. He had come to realize why Kevin had been so desperate to have the dumbass in their team — Andrew had seen his stats prior: they were mediocre at best; but in the video, Josten played like he had no time to waste and had nothing to lose. Andrew had found a rope that could make holding Kevin’s leash easier. Maybe having the goddamn rookie  _was_  a good idea after all.

 

       No, he had been immediately wrong. He’d known Josten would be a problem —  _is_  a problem — and something that just wouldn’t add up. But after going through the rookie’s stuff, he had seen something that had signaled a bright colored red siren persistently blaring an endless singsong of  _ **Threat, Threat, Threat**_  inside his head. Josten was a possible threat to Kevin, and a possible threat to Kevin meant a possible threat to Andrew’s people. He had needed answers and the rookie had to give them. He wouldn’t allow any unwelcomed possibility to become possible.

 

       The half-truths had been poorly woven and they only led to more questions that Andrew had been uninterested in knowing the answers to, but at least he got to assess whether Josten was worthy enough to keep his life and Andrew’s final verdict had been —  yes, he  _is_ ~~(was, for a year)~~. A deal is a deal, he’d make Andrew’s job easier then Andrew would give Josten the protection he needed, thus giving more time for Josten to relish his miserable life before people who wanted to kill him get the job done.

 

       They did come — the people who were supposed to get the job done — they came and Andrew released the idiot from their deal before it even happened. Andrew had seen red, black, grey — he was soaked in too many colors, he can barely see anything in the mixture of muddled paint. He wanted to make sense of everything — he wanted to know who threw the tin of paint with colors that didn’t make sense. He became an artist whose eyes were color blinded, a painter with no brush left to paint with, a writer with no ink to spare on paper — he was Andrew who lost one dumbass amidst the chaos of the riot that didn’t even make any sense.

 

       Nothing was making any sense and Andrew used to want nothing and Neil was supposed to be nothing. But now he’s left with a dumped duffle bag with a key holder bearing thousands of keys, a phone that has a read message that only said “0”, and an abandoned racket that belonged to a red head idiot with eyes that had an unimaginable shade of blue, an unusual burst to a world that’s plainly black and white.

 

       All of those things sprawled on the ground, abandoned, left behind — shouldn’t amount to anything, yet they left an unsettling feeling inside of him, slowly eating his scarcely remaining sanity away.

 

       Sunrise, Abram, and Death — those were the truths — Abram came back and that was an unchangeable, unquestionable, and irrevocable fact. Let the FBI question Nathaniel, but after that he’d join his father. Andrew had told  _ **Neil**_  to stay and for  _ **Nathaniel**_  to die and be buried with his father’s memory and body, and  _ **Abram**_  — Abram had been the one to say yes.

 

       Andrew Joseph Minyard, by all means, is not an emotional person but when Neil Josten barreled fast to Andrew’s racket, his first thought was vulnerable, weak, and a problem. But Neil had been there to prove him wrong, time and time again. From being a fucking threat, he had turned into someone to protect, into someone to exchange truths with, and finally into someone who Andrew couldn’t —  _wouldn’t_ — turn his back on.

 

       Abram was a ticking time bomb that didn’t get to explode, a broken compass that still managed to point to the right directions, a burning house on the verge of collapsing with Andrew on its rooftop — who’s afraid of heights but learned how to look up than down, who forgot the fear of the fall because he learned how to fly.

 

       Andrew Joseph Minyard, by all means, is not an emotional person and he knows any other person they would call  _this_  love, but Andrew, different as he is from the rest, doesn’t. However, that doesn’t mean he’s incapable of having  _ **this**_.

 

       At first he didn’t want to acknowledge whatever it had been that Neil managed to stir in him. He knew after the riot that this was something different from his usual attractions, but he was cautious enough not to associate it with that four-letter-word. That word was simply too close to the word  _ **‘please’**_ and ‘ _ **misunderstanding’**_. It was also near to the word  _ **‘family’**_  that Andrew couldn’t even stand hearing.

 

       The word  _ **please**_ was something that left its mark too deep, that’s simply hidden by layers of clothing and armbands during the day but manages to show its crooked teeth and sharp long nails when there were no locked doors, eerie shadows, and things that go bump in the night along with the inescapable nightmares that would make him relive everything, like the experience itself hadn’t been bad enough.

 

       Then  _ **misunderstanding**_ was a vivid reminder of how the world  _is_  an awful place and how bleak and colorless it really is — with nothing but just black and white to shade everything in it. And  _ **family**_ was simply something that little naïve hopeful Andrew had long wanted but never got to have ( ~~— pipe dream~~ ); it’s not Aaron and Nicky, and not even Kevin or Neil ( ~~not even the Foxes~~ ) but it was too close to desperation and despair, and it was where everything began when it never even should have started.

 

       All of those words were intangible yet unbreakable and inescapable strings from his past that he would forget if he only could, he would lose to never have back, he would throw away to never want back — but regret brings nothing but more hollowness that he already had long carried within him — adding that word is just too much and too less to equate to anything he share with Neil.

 

       Andrew Joseph Minyard, by all means, is not an emotional person but he had long accepted that Abram is the last one inside Pandora ’s Box ( ** ~~hope~~** ), the sacrifice that no one asked for ( ** ~~salvation~~** ), and the key to a place where he belongs to ( ** ~~home~~** ). 

 

(Abram is more and less of everything Andrew had ever wanted — a pipe dream come true.)

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos and comments would be highly appreciated by the sleep-deprived author ;u;  
> (specially comments about how I wrote andrew in this fic??)


End file.
